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I read Christof Koch’s Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist a few months back & I agree with Kathleen Reeves’ take on the book. The only thing she leaves out of her review is the dishonest tease of the word “confessions” in the title. In the introductory pages & throughout the book, Koch hints that he will reveal how some personal experience that transformed his thinking. But all the reader gets is a superficial description of the author’s predictable midlife crisis in which he leaves his wife & drinks too much pinot noir, neither of which affect his smug scientism in the least. For a book about consciousness, there is very little evidence of self-consciousness, in the sense of self-knowledge. I kept thinking how adolescent the book seemed.

Schopenhauer himself hardly practiced the pessimistic asceticism he preached: he was fond of the pleasures of the table; enjoyed many sensual affairs; was quarrelsome, greedy, and obsessed with his fame. He also kept a poodle named Atma–Sanskrit for “world soul.”

At least my terriers don’t have pretentious names. (Jett, Dash, & Candy, since you ask. And since they are all rescues, they came to us with those names already given.)

Just finished reading Katharine Haake’s formally adventurous post-industrial dystopian nightmare, The Time of Quarantine. It’s a genre I’m attracted to, both as reader & teacher — I’ve taught Atwood’s Oryx & Crake and Butler’s Parable of the Sower many times, finding them particularly effective with my first year students at Clarkson. I bought Haake’s book with these ideas in mind, but was quickly disabused of the notion that I could use this book with first-year students: the language & especially the shifting point of view & non-sequential presentation of events would throw them for a loop. It takes training to read this sort of fiction!

Imagine a novel set entirely inside Second Life. All of the characters are avatars, in the sense we now use the word, of actual people who also populate the novel, though the avatars are more “real” than the human beings they represent. That’s how The Time of Quarantine feels & it has interesting & troubling consequences that affect narrative technique & what I suppose I’d have to call fictional ontology. I found it difficult to track the shifts between flesh & blood & avatars, which I think is the point: in the world of the novel the cyberworld has begun to engulf the physical world. Under such circumstances, human agency beaks down & the characters behave like half-conscious puppets.

There are four central characters, Peter, Lyda, Helen, & Will. All but Will (get it?) have implants in their brains that connect them into the network, though how the internet is stiff functioning at a time when virtually all the rest of the world & its institutions have have gone kerflooey stretches plausibility. Peter is the puppetmaster. Removed by his neurologist father to an Intentional Community (IC) during the time of quarantine, he watches everyone in his small community die off of a plague he has himself brought in from the outside. After that, he is “raised by computers” that have been programmed by his father to entertain & deceive him. Not sure why. And that’s the big problem here: it is very difficult to track any of the characters’ motives for doing what they do, to the extent that they act on their own at all, for it is Peter, ultimately, from his defunct quarantine community, who goes out onto the net, finds, Lyda, Helen & Will & draws them to himself. They will start over. It’s not exactly Eden, but that’s where the story ends. Peter insists that they must remain in this eden of his making of their own free will, but how can that be, since he has lured them there & made it impossible for them to leave. Peter’s solipsism is quite monstrous.

The tone of these comments belies a good deal of exasperation, I know. Haake often writes beautifully, but so much of this story is spent inside the characters’ heads — actual events almost always being remembered or dreamed — that the narrative develops virtually no forward momentum. I’m not demanding a page-turner; I can appreciate modernist fiction; but the gravitational force of interiority ultimately causes this fiction to collapse in upon itself.